The idea of communism – the common sharing of productive property and its resulting output – is as old as the ancient Greeks and Plato’s conception of the ideal Republic in which the guardians all live and work in common under the presumption that a radical change in the social institutional setting will transform men from self-interested beings into altruistic servers to some defined needs of society as a whole.

This highlights a fundamental difference in the conception of man in the classical liberal versus socialist worldviews. Does man have a basic and invariant human nature that may be multi-sided and complex, but no less fixed in certain qualities and characteristics? Or is human nature a malleable substance that can be remolded like clay in the sculptor’s hands by placing human beings into radically different social arrangements and settings?

Classical liberals have argued for the former, that human beings are basically what they are: fairly reasonable, self-interested beings, guided by goals of personal improvement and betterment as the individual comes to define those for himself. The social dilemma for a humane, just, and widely prosperous society is how to foster a political and economic institutional order to harness that invariant quality in human nature so that it advances human betterment in general rather than becoming a tool of plunder. The classical liberal answer is basically Adam Smith’s system of natural liberty with its open, competitive, free market order.

Members of what was emerging as the socialist movement in the late eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century argued the opposite. They insisted that if men were selfish, greedy, uncaring and insensitive to the circumstances of their fellow men it was due to the institution of private property and its related market-based system of human association. Change the institutional order in which human beings live and work and you will create a “new man.”

Indeed, they raised to the ultimate human societal ideal, a world in which the individual would live and work for the collective, the society as a whole, rather than only for his own bettered circumstances, presumably at the expense of others in society. Socialism heralded the ethics of altruism.

...

Thus, there had to be in place and in power a “revolutionary vanguard” of dedicated and clear seeing socialists who would lead “the masses” into the bright, beautiful future of communism. The institutional means of doing this, said Marx, is the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

In other words, until the masses, the workers, are freed from the individualist and capitalist mindset that they had been born into and mentally made to act within, they needed to be “reeducated” by a self-appointed political elite that has liberated their minds, already, from the capitalist false consciousness of the past. In the name of the new socialist-era freedom-to-come, there must the reign of a dictatorship made up of those who know how humanity should think, act, and associate in preparation for the full communism awaiting mankind.

At the same time, the dictatorship is necessary to suppress not only any attempts by the former capitalist exploiters to restore their power over the, now, socialized property they used to own. These voices from the capitalist past also must be prevented from speaking their self-serving lies and deceptions about why individual, self-interested liberty is morally right, or that private property serves the betterment of all in society including workers, or that freedom means those “bourgeois” liberties of freedom of the press, or speech or religion or democratic voting. The masses must be brought to, and indoctrinated in, the “true” consciousness that freedom means the collective ownership and direction of the means of production and the selfless serving of society that the socialist revolutionary vanguard in charge knows to be true.

This also explains why the socialist phase of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” could never end in any of the Marxist-inspired revolutionary regimes over the last one hundred years. Human nature is not waiting to be remolded like wax into a new human form and content. Human beings seem generally not be hardwired to be altruistic, selfless eunuchs. Thus, self-interest always rises to the surface in people’s conduct, and if it is to be ethically denied, there must be political force to keep repressing it and trying to constantly extinguish it.

...

Not one corner of everyday life – its form, content, quality, or characteristics – was free from the control and determination of the all powerful and all-encompassing socialist state. Its design and attempted implementation was truly “totalitarian.” It may have been Benito Mussolini, the father of fascism, who coined the term, “totalitarianism” as meaning “everything in the State, nothing against the State, nothing outside the State.” But nowhere over the last century was this more insistently, pervasively, and coercively imposed than in the communist countries molded on the model of the Soviet Union as created by Vladimir Lenin and horrifyingly institutionalized by Josef Stalin and their successors.

The OP is mental masturbation.
If socialism requires a dictator, please name the "dictator" of Sweden, France, Denmark, go ahead take a stab.

I understand the poster just did a cut and paste, and probably didn't read what he was posting, and if he did read it, didn't understand it.
Right wing thinking requires that perfect divorce from reality to take place.

The OP is mental masturbation.
If socialism requires a dictator, please name the "dictator" of Sweden, France, Denmark, go ahead take a stab.

I understand the poster just did a cut and paste, and probably didn't read what he was posting, and if he did read it, didn't understand it.
Right wing thinking requires that perfect divorce from reality to take place.

The OP is mental masturbation.
If socialism requires a dictator, please name the "dictator" of Sweden, France, Denmark, go ahead take a stab.

I understand the poster just did a cut and paste, and probably didn't read what he was posting, and if he did read it, didn't understand it.
Right wing thinking requires that perfect divorce from reality to take place.

I know that Danes have been offended by people calling their country socialist.

AND the quaking sheep STILL can't figure out the meaning of socialism. OH yes. They THINK they know, which is why we hear the repetitious chants about the evils of socialism and how IT NEVER WORKS--NEVER. Then they offer up the Scandinavian countries as examples. Knock Knock!! Anyone home?
There are NO dictators and in fact myths about Sweden, Norway, Denmark, etc. are simply that. MYTHS.
In the Scandinavian countries, like all other developed nations, the means of production are primarily owned by private individuals, not the community or the government, and resources are allocated to their respective uses by the market, not government or community planning. Scandinavian countries DO provide things like a generous social safety net and universal healthcare, an extensive welfare state is not the same thing as socialism. Their system is called social democracy.

AND the quaking sheep STILL can't figure out the meaning of socialism. OH yes. They THINK they know, which is why we hear the repetitious chants about the evils of socialism and how IT NEVER WORKS--NEVER. Then they offer up the Scandinavian countries as examples. Knock Knock!! Anyone home?
There are NO dictators and in fact myths about Sweden, Norway, Denmark, etc. are simply that. MYTHS.
In the Scandinavian countries, like all other developed nations, the means of production are primarily owned by private individuals, not the community or the government, and resources are allocated to their respective uses by the market, not government or community planning. Scandinavian countries DO provide things like a generous social safety net and universal healthcare, an extensive welfare state is not the same thing as socialism. Their system is called social democracy.

So you were responding to boogers retarded post, ok. Then why not just post that and save the rest of us your longwinded meaningless blather.

Just like a woman talking to just make sounds never really saying anything of importance